Showing Friendship: Negotiating Resistance to Victimization Within Adolescent Friendships

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Cultural Capital in Early Childhood and Linkages to Adolescence

Abstract

Extant quantitative data suggest that about a quarter of bullying incidences occur within reciprocated friendships. Yet, little attention is given to the underlying social processes and wider macro-system forces that shape friendship victimization experiences. Guided by constructivist grounded theory, this research developed a theoretical framework of victimization within adolescent friendships, from the retrospective accounts of Canadian women. Our findings suggest that participants resisted victimization in important ways but that their resistance strategies were negotiated within gendered and discursive constructions of resistance, bullying, and victimhood. The results illuminate the ways that discourses that conceal women’s resistance and privilege overt responses to bullying run counter to gendered expectations for resistance, leaving women in a double bind.

Authors

• Karen Leigh Bouchard, University of Ottawa

• Camilla Forsberg, Linköping University

• David Smith, University of Ottawa

• Robert Thornberg, Linköping University